(Since my fingertips are incredibly soft and tender and every single keystroke causes me immeasurable pain, I've decided to copy and paste the rest of this post from the one I made on Something Awful. Needless to say, I think this will be an important discovery that the Sonic community will be talking about for years to come. Perhaps even front page worthy, right? Right?)

Back in about 2nd or 3rd grade, I knew a kid named Andy Kong. I'll always remember that I used to crack up almost every time his name was called for attendance, since it sounded like a Donkey Kong character. (I was one of those kids)
Andy and I weren't really close friends, but we occasionally played together at recess. He was a fairly dull kid, but we shared an interest in video games so we got along well enough. He always would tell me his uncle Sanford worked at Capcom. Even back then this struck me as being full of shit. I'd heard people say their relative who worked at a video game company said such and such before and you know what? I asked the Blockbuster guy and there WASN'T a Sonic 10, Spencer you lying fuck. Anyway, he changed schools and I never heard from him again.

Last Friday, out of the blue, I got a subjectless e-mail from one Sanford Kong. I thought it had to be a coincidence, but when I checked the sender's email, it was a Capcom address. Son of a bitch, I thought. I was about to type up a message asking how to get Chun-Li to throw her bracelets in SFII when I realized that 1) I hadn't so much as glanced at the contents and 2) there was a rather large file attached. The email simply read:

Quote

If you can read this it's already too late. I have committed a terrible sin. I had no idea Sega would go this far to protect their company's secrets... They've taken everything I have, killed my siblings and my nephew, and now they want to kill me. I pray this prototype makes it to safe hands. Show the public... the... truth... about the terrible secret of Sonic the Hedgehog™ 4: Episode II... URGH. -Sanford Kong

Being a Sonic fan, I was pretty excited. It's not every day you get to play an early prototype of a game that hasn't even been shown yet. It's an EXE file, so I'm guessing it was meant for PC? I'm not sure what to make of it. I love that they brought back Dust Hill Zone and the final boss seems pretty cool but I don't like the way Tails plays and most of the other levels bring up strange error messages. Each level brings up a different one, but I have no idea what they mean. Maybe someone here can decode them for me?

The level select cheat from Sonic 1 works on this one too. I've heard most of Sega's protos use it as a debug code. (up, down, left, right on the title screen if you're an ignorant fuck and didn't know)

Some pictures:

UPDATE:
After installing a gameshark and applying an IPS patch to the null offset gigabyte binary at frequency 456kbps, I managed to unlock more of the prototype's features. This is as complete as it will get, unfortunately.

Additions include but are not limited to:

-A HACK GAME button on the player select screen
-Unlocked the SPACIAL STAGE
-Unlocked Fat Tuesday Zone's Boss
-Unlocked title screen idle demo (wait for the music to finish on the title screen, it plays a neat video summing up the story so far)
-Unlocked the importance of maintaining a balanced diet
-Unlocked the real superpower of teamwork
-Unlocked Hulkamania
-Unlocked Big Head mode